Suddenly, Gray was conscious.
Something had happened and there was some kind of external force that caused him to wake up, but he couldn't tell what it was. It was angry, and he felt like it was pissed off at him for some reason. It felt somehow hot, and familiar.
He found himself floating in astral form with his final opponent, who was thrashing around and fighting violently in its own astral form since neither was capable of actual physical movement within the Iced Shell. There were places that they seemed to be connected, like Gray was missing some part of himself and they'd somehow ended up stuck together this way.
Gray didn't even know how much time had passed, or why he was awake. There didn't seem to be any reason to it, and judging by the fact that it took Ur years to kill a weakened Deliora, he assumed that this dragon would continue its struggle against him possibly for decades.
The dragon, stuck in its elemental form, had inundated the space they were in with its ice magic.
There was too much carryover, because the dragon was in ice form and Gray was in ice form, so within the nucleus of the icy prison was a mass of ice magic that pulsated outward.
That external force tickled the edges of his senses like someone banging on the wall, and he wondered what was happening on the outside of the Iced Shell.
Then everything suddenly went black for him, as if he was aware but he could no longer sense himself, and it felt like more of him was missing. As if he was being pulled into a vortex, he felt like his consciousness was disappearing and came to the horrified realization that they were congealing into one creature and he wasn't the one that was making that happen. He was being absorbed somehow, and it was an absolutely terrifying idea.
The sensation that awoke Gray came from a certain dragon slayer slamming fire-engulfed fists into the wall of ice before him until his knuckles were cut to pieces and bruised. Natsu was infuriated with him for 'quitting,' and even when he found the gore that was severed from Gray's body, he still hated him for using Iced Shell.
How could he give up?
But Natsu thought that there was a lung on the ground, so if Gray didn't 'give up,' wouldn't that mean that he died for no reason?
Natsu didn't want to think about it, because ever since he learned about the Iced Shell, he wondered why it existed. Why couldn't a mage just believe in their friends and win?
When he heard a noise, he spun and saw Laxus standing behind him, showing the first sympathy that Natsu had ever seen from him.
"Gramps sent me to come get you. He thinks you're going to run off and get killed just like Gray," he stated as he looked up at the ice. "A dragon? A dragon made completely from ice? How terrifying."
Then Laxus reached out and put his hand on the ice. "Iced Shell, right? Gramps told me there was a good chance that this is how Gray would choose to go out."
A giant crack suddenly started to form in the ice near the top.
"That's impossible!" Natsu exclaimed, "Iced Shell can't be broken out of like that! What's happening?!"
Laxus asked, "If fire dragons eat fire, what do you think an ice dragon eats?"
"No way…you're saying…you're saying you think it's eating Gray?"
A chunk of the ice vanished, leaving part of the dragon's side exposed to open air.
Natsu gasped and pulled on his scarf. "Gray, you idiot!" he screamed.
A powerful bolt of lightning struck the exposed part of the dragon's body, then another, and the lightning mage said, "We should kill it while it's still being held still. I assume Gray chose this because he didn't want this thing coming after us."
There were a lot of questions in the younger man's mind about his friend. If Gray's life was turned into ice, what happened if only part of him was consumed? Did that mean that a part of his soul would be simply gone? It was scary on all counts, because even during the difficult life of a wizard, death was supposed to be the worst thing that could happen.
Having half of your being eaten after your whole self has turned into a stationary block of ice after being gruesomely mutilated was simply unfathomably scary.
At the same time, Natsu didn't want Gray to be completely eaten, and he definitely didn't want another enemy. If the dragon escaped, it meant that Gray essentially died for nothing, and his rival couldn't bear that idea.
So as the Iced Shell slowly vanished, they burned and electrocuted the dragon over the course of two hours with very little to show for it. The icy scales melted in places, but only to reveal more ice.
Exhausted, Natsu exclaimed, "Are they really this difficult to kill? Yet, people have done it. People have killed dragons."
"Probably not by a protracted barrage of elemental damage."
"By a what?"
Laxus answered, "If this amount of damage can't do it, then humans shouldn't be able to kill them at all. It can't even move. There's something we're missing. There's a trick and we don't know what it is."
Another chunk of the ice seemingly sank into the flesh of the dragon and a tail covered in huge spikes broke free and began whipping about.
For the distance the retreated to avoid it, they stared at the dragon that was only half-encased in ice. Cracks were forming all over the Iced Shell, so it seemed like it might break free at any minute. And for all their efforts, it didn't show any signs of even being weakened.
The sun's angle had changed, and when Natsu shifted, the light reflected perfectly on what had been the shadowed side during the morning. "There's something in the ice?"
"Eh?"
"Look, there. It looks like…a gem? A marble? It's almost the exact same color as the ice."
Laxus moved to beside him so he could see the tiny bauble. "I've seen one of those before…"
Natsu, having one of his more astute moments, said, "If the dragon lacrima in you gives you the power of a dragon, does that mean the magic that makes that thing impossible to kill comes from that little thing?"
"…And more importantly, if we rip it out, will that thing die?"
The dragon slayer suddenly felt a little queasy, because they were talking about killing, not capacitating and maybe lecturing. "Are you sure we have to kill it? Maybe we could just scare it and let it go."
"I think if Gray thought it should be free he would have just died like a dog instead of this. This is a fate worse than death – at least make sure his final wish is obeyed. Gray wanted this thing to die, so we're going to kill it," Laxus answered, "Our scents are here. If it eats the ice and gets free, it'll kill us too."
More cracks appeared in the ice and cold magic started to seep through them.
"And we have to do it now, because that thing is almost free."
Natsu didn't want to consider that sometimes it was completely necessary to kill, but hot on the heels of his dead peers, he choked down and said, "Nothing is worse for ice than fire, right?"
The lacrima was behind the intact part of the Iced Shell, but Natsu took a deep breath. "Try to hold the tail still!"
It was a perilous request at best, but when Laxus got his hands on the tail, he managed to avoid the spikes on it and pulled the slack out of it, giving it powerful jolts of electricity to keep it from jerking back and forth.
Natsu walked up to the wall of ice and growled, "Let me in, jackass!"
And when he slammed his fist into the ice, it slid through what was left of Gray's body to the icy scales of the dragon. Expending every last ounce of magic he had, he set off the mother of all firebombs around his hand and clenched his hand around the gem that he'd seen.
Instantly, the dragon's body turned from ice form to flesh and the tail went slack. The magic pressure disappeared, and the scent of death suddenly appeared.
The lacrima was so cold that Natsu let go of it after less than a second and pulled his arm out of the ice, leaving it suspended in the Iced Shell.
At that point, the only thing either of the wizards could do was rest.
In the darkness where Gray was, he couldn't remember anything or see anything. But he knew whatever had been merging with him was gone even though there were parts of it that seemed to stick with him. There was something else, something that was cold, and it sank into him. He wished that he could see what had intruded on his space in the astral prison, and suddenly, he could.
He wished he could hear about what was happening outside, and he heard a voice.
It was a voice that irritated him, but somehow, it was the most wonderful sound. Gray could vaguely remember Natsu asking to enter him, but couldn't remember who Natsu was or what happened.
The shining ball of light didn't have a voice, but for some reason, he was sure if he embraced it, he would remember where he was or how he got there. It was a living thing, and it was ice and for some reason, he felt like he could understand the ice.
Gray decided he would use its power, so he could remember why he was there and because he had the weird urge to go back to the voice outside. He was there for a reason, he had something, he wanted to do, and somehow, he knew that if he didn't use it, he would linger there in the dark place forever until he died.
He wanted to go back. He wanted to be himself.
Outside, Natsu was sitting next to the ice with his back against it. It was filled with cracks, had completely disappeared in places, and had a dead dragon hanging out of it. Some morbid part of his brain told him they had to cut up the dragon and wrench it out of the ice or it was going to rot in the Iced Shell.
He wasn't even sure why Gray had been attacked there, since there was nothing to find in the ruins. Laxus said the only thing that he could think of is that the dragons didn't know where Juvia was and the temple was the link between Juvia and them. Therefore, if humans tried to find out about what happened to her, the logical place to go was the temple, which could be under guard by someone who would get the truth out of whoever was dumb enough to show up.
It was the surprised "Tch!" from Laxus that caused him to look up to find a third party had joined them.
It was a woman with short white hair, pale skin, and mild, unexceptional white features, including pale, light gray eyes. Her entire body was hidden by a long white cape that was cinched closed with a Saint Wizard medallion.
"Fancy finding you in a place like this," Laxus hissed.
Natsu asked, "You know this person?"
"Atlantis the Water Witch."
Atlantis said, "I see now. Fairy Tail appeared. So the Vessel must be in some form of direct contact with you. A client, or, perhaps, a member?"
Natsu, whose normal instincts were to fight first and ask questions later, found that he'd matured enough over the past three hours to realize he and Laxus were basically out of magic and Atlantis had the medallion that said if she was an enemy, she was going to be a very difficult one. And truthfully, the 'water witch' aspect of it gave him a lot of pause as a fire mage.
When he looked to Laxus, the blond shook his head once, advising him not to do anything.
She looked over at Natsu. "Your guild has a water mage, doesn't it? I read something to that effect in Sorcerer's Weekly. To think the Vessel was in Fairy Tail…"
Her nearly lifeless-looking eyes glanced around the area, from the rubble to the two wizards. "On Tenrou Island, you didn't know how to do it, did you? But now you know."
"Know what?!" Natsu asked.
"How to kill a dragon. For that knowledge to be in the hands of the world's most dangerous dragon slayers isn't acceptable. You are both weak, and low on magic power. Eliminating you here is best. You'll become a nuisance if I do not," Atlantis mechanically uttered.
Natsu didn't want to believe she was being serious about assassinating them, but half a second later, he just narrowly dodged a blade of water that opened an enormous wound on his neck. It wasn't immediately fatal, but he had to jump out of the way and rely on Laxus to distract the water mage long enough to tie his scarf tightly around his throat. If his reflexes had been half a second late, she would have taken his head off just like that.
They were tired, they had almost no magic, and there wasn't any immediate way to solve either of these problems. When he lit up his fists to punch, she let him get close and his fist sailed through a body made from water and was immediately extinguished.
But then he couldn't pull his fist out of Atlantis and knives of water cut into his skin in dozens of places before a bolt of lightning struck her and went into him, throwing them apart.
Atlantis was like Gildarts; when she was fighting, she barely moved. It was like he meant nothing to her as an opponent, and even though his instinct was to ask her why her body was like Juvia's, he held his tongue.
Natsu tried to fondly recollect a lesson Macao gave him about how purple flare could defeat water magic. Clearly, Macao had never run into Atlantis the Water Witch, someone even Laxus took very seriously.
He fought like an underdog, dodging attacks and waiting for a moment when he could strike safely rather than just absorbing everything and overpowering the opponent.
And then she moved, and Natsu thought Laxus had dodged, but then his shirt suddenly started to turn red because his side had been split open. When the lightning wizard fell to his knees, Natsu – who was already woozy from losing too much of his own blood – threw a fire ball at her which collided with a ball of water.
That angry look she gave him made his blood run cold, and the concussive blast from a massive water bomb sent him flying into Laxus and then into what was left of the Iced Shell. Heads smacked against the hard surface hard enough to cause ringing in the ears, and they soon found a wall of hundreds of daggers of water flying at them from all angles.
Laxus didn't even have enough magic to teleport out of the way, and the daggers were big, sharp, and high enough in numbers that there was no way he could see this fight ending in anything other than the gruesome mutilation of their corpses.
In an instant, all those daggers turned to ice and fell to the ground and the Iced Shell exploded behind them, causing Natsu to fall onto his back and glance upon a silhouette of the unmistakable Gray Fullbuster made completely from ice.
Then that ice turned to flesh that really didn't resemble the Gray that Natsu knew as much as one would expect. The parts of his body that were physically removed before he entered the Iced Shell – a big chunk of his chest and most of one of his hands – looked as if they'd simply been rebuilt using dragon flesh and were covered with light-colored translucent scales. The hand that was injured didn't even look human anymore, replaced but what more closely resembled a dragon's talon.
The scales were in various other places in uneven patches, and his dark eyes looked completely reptilian and the colored part seemed to be made from ice.
Gray basically looked like a monster. Scarred, scaly, and inhuman in various places, he came out of the ice staring at their opponent and his gaze never wavered.
All around him, it was so insufferably cold.
A water blade came toward him, and Gray put his hand out and turned it to ice, then used ice make magic to create a tall, thick wall to separate his injured nakama from their enemy.
Atlantis stared at him, seeming somehow bored by all of this, as if murder was an inconvenient and she had better things to do. Then her eyes trailed down further. "Does it bother you that you're naked in front of a lady?"
Gray was still patching things together in his own mind, but he'd managed to figure out that for whatever reason, he wasn't at all shy about letting his dick wag around in the open air. It felt oddly familiar to him. "For some reason, not at all."
"My body is made from water. You can never hurt me, so I don't know why you think you can look upon me with such viciousness."
Made from water?
She was like Juvia, which caused him to remember Juvia, and the fact that he'd come there to save her. Running into someone like her who knew what was going on was easily one of the best things that could happen, and Gray had no problem extracting the information by absolutely any means necessary. In this horrible tale, he was way past the point where he could be a gentleman about anything.
Much like fire was uniquely disadvantaged against water, water was similarly disadvantaged by ice magic..
There was something in him that hadn't been there before – a side effect of merging with something that wasn't his – and he wanted to just rip into the enemy like some kind of animal. Rake his claws across her flawless skin and make her abandon her calm demeanor for screaming while he inflicted enormous amounts of pain on her.
"Such bloodlust...it makes me shiver," his opponent said.
Gray answered, "Your body is made from water. That means you must know about Juvia."
"Is that the name the Vessel is using? That makes it so much easier to find her."
And this, this made Gray lose whatever control he had left.
Ice make magic took an enormous amount of resolve and thinking power to execute, so he could never really lose his mind, but now, ice magic was flowing through his entire body. Maybe it wasn't even just ice in its pure form, but dominance over cold that obeyed when he lunged forward and his normal hand became coated in a jagged chunk of ice.
Atlantis turned to water to dodge the attack and he swept his hand through the water, turning what was supposed to be her arm into harmless ice.
The wizard mage reassembled her body, and her entire arm was missing because it was no longer water.
The water mage's unaffected attitude disappeared when she saw blood gush from where her left arm abruptly ended at her shoulder, and on the other side of his wall, Laxus and Natsu heard her scream in horror.
Atlantis had never met a powerful ice wizard because it was actually a somewhat rare magic. Never once had she considered that dominion over ice also implied some dual-nature command over water. But Gray already knew someone like Atlantis, so of course he'd figured that much out.
She couldn't risk turning into water, and there was blood everywhere. Natsu's, Laxus's, and hers and not far from them, the dried blood and rotting gore leftover from Gray's battle.
He came at her with a fist covered in ice at a pace that was too fast to dodge, and absolutely certain that turning to water would result in her brain turning to ice and falling on the ground, she took it to the left cheek, feeling the sharp edges cut so deep into her face that for the rest of her life, she'd be scarred.
"…monster!" she hissed.
Gray hit her again and then pinned her to the ground. "Maybe I am, but whose fault is that?"
He pressed his clawed hand to her throat. "Suddenly, I have this side that just wants to tear you open just to see what you look like on the inside. So, you're going to talk to me. I've earned that much."
"I won't betray my master. Even if you kill me, you're never going to learn anything."
At that point, Natsu managed to melt through the ice wall and found his rival had pinned their would-be killer to the ground. Atlantis was shaking in utter terror as she stared up at him, forcing out declarations of loyalty between teeth that chattered from fear and chill.
Natsu wanted to tell Gray to stop, but he knew if Gray stopped – even for his own good because he looked like he was absolutely out of his own mind – that he and Laxus couldn't fight Atlantis in the state they were in. Gray could contend with her because he wasn't injured, out of magic, or otherwise grossly disadvantaged where she was concerned.
"When is this horrible nightmare going to end?" he whispered to himself.
Laxus didn't say anything, because he was unconscious in a pool of blood, so Natsu moved over to him and started to burn the worst wounds closed. The smell of blood, burning flesh, death…everything about where they were at that moment seemed like hell, and he'd believed until Gray reappeared that they were going to die a gory death at the hands of the so-called Saint Wizard.
He heard more screaming and saw Gray working his monster talon into where her arm now ended, and then a flurry of words that promised even if Gray killed her, Acnologia couldn't be stopped. He'd find them.
Natsu decided he'd close his eyes for a while, and let whatever Gray was doing just happen. Maybe he could recover his strength if he just closed his eyes and thought about the times when Fairy Tail was a place of drinking and partying and friendly scrapping and not a place where things like this happened.
When he opened them again, it was nighttime, and he was somewhere else, sleeping on a bed after having passed out from his neck injury.
His wounds were dressed, he was in clean clothes, and he could smell food and fire. When he went to the bathroom near the room where he had been sleeping, he pulled the bandage on his neck back and learned that a quarter of an inch and he would have bleed to death earlier that day. For someone that had been in as many battles as he had, he'd had so few injuries like this.
The walls were giant logs, and Natsu remembered a cluster of log cabins by a lake not far from the temple.
Downstairs, Gray was sitting at a table with Laxus eating like he'd never eaten in his entire life.
His appearance seemed normal, but Natsu couldn't look at him and not see what he'd seen before. The only thing about him that seemed different in this calm state was scales on the back of his hand and on his chest. But Natsu almost couldn't stand to look at him without seeing the clawed, inhuman monster he'd seen earlier.
Natsu sat down and stared at his rival. "How did you come out of the Iced Shell?"
"Because you dropped an ice dragon lacrima into my ice. Laxus can turn from lightning to flesh and back again with a lacrima even though human bodies shouldn't be capable of that. So I guess it makes sense that an ice dragon lacrima would allow the same thing to happen." The ice wizard seemed sad when he added, "My body isn't really the same though. I don't know if I'm going to live very long like this."
"Why wouldn't you?"
Gray said, "I don't know exactly, but I think my body was patched up by the lacrima and is held together by its magic. It seems to take a lot of magic. It feels poisonous. Atlantis told us that most of the people who have a lacrima put into their bodies end up dead. She was a failed second gen that almost died when her body rejected the lacrima that's in Juvia now. That's why her magic was like Juvia's."
"She also said that the thing Gramps was talking about was true. Juvia has a real monster that could wipe our guild off the earth inside of her body right now," Laxus added, "What we don't know – and what they don't understand either – is the reason it's staying in Magnolia. There must be something there that Hydra wants that's keeping it close to Fairy Tail instead of making contact with its allies."
Natsu narrowed his eyes. "Hydra…I've heard that name before. It was something Igneel said. Something about water? I guess that's kind of not helpful at this point."
Gray tuned out the sound of the others. Before Atlantis was executed – an option that was ultimately executed by Gray in the calmest of states with the agreement of Laxus – she told them enough for them to fully realize how dire their situation was. If they hadn't killed her, she would have told the likes of those allied with Acnologia where to find what that dragon was apparently desperate to find.
When Gray heard about Gajeel, he felt a stab of guilt, because he'd had the choice to kill Juvia and eliminate the enemy before it ever took possession of her. He knew somehow, even then, that it might be the right thing to do, but he couldn't. So far, Gajeel had been killed, meaning he made a decision that resulted in Gajeel's death. That same decision resulted in what nearly killed himself by way of Iced Shell as well as Natsu and Laxus at the hands of Atlantis.
And if that had all happened, Fairy Tail would have been left to take on the enemy without Laxus, Juvia, Gajeel, Natsu, or himself. It was not a winning proposition, and everything happened because he wouldn't kill Juvia.
Gray wondered when Juvia became so important to him. Wasn't she a nuisance, a stalker, a person that just bothered him and followed him around nursing an unhealthy fascination? That wasn't true anymore. He'd basically died for her and killed for her, and allowed other people to be killed because he refused to raise a deadly hand against her.
No matter what happened to either of them from that point on, their fates were so tightly tangled that she could never just be some ancillary character that existed. In her absolute darkest hour, she asked him for death and he promised he'd save her.
Gray had no intention of going back on that oath, no matter how much more he had to sacrifice.
Special thanks to Wayuuum, .yan, trapeze swingers, YuYoLs, counterfactuals, ivory9elektra11fullbuster, Yukari Hiwada, Starjade101, LaNoireChatte, and shadowsaver for reviewing!